Flog a Pro: The Cuckoo’s Calling by “Robert Galbraith” (J.K. Rowling)

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

The challenge: does this narrative compel you to turn the page?

[pullquote]Storytelling Checklist

Evaluate this opening page for how well it executes the following 6 vital storytelling elements. While it’s not a requirement that all of them must be on the first page, I think writers have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are. The one vital ingredient not listed is professional-caliber writing, a given for every page.

Story questions

Tension (in the reader, not just the characters)

Voice

Clarity

Scene-setting

Character

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Let’s Flog The Cuckoo’s Calling by J.K. Rowling

What would have happened if the opening of this book, the prologue, was submitted to a literary agent by “Robert Galbraith” instead of handed to her publisher by J.K. Rowling? Following is what would be the first manuscript page (16 lines) of the Prologue in The Cuckoo’s Calling.

The buzz in the street was like the humming of flies. Photographers stood massed behind barriers patrolled by police, their long-snouted cameras poised, their breath rising like steam. Snow fell steadily on to hats and shoulders; gloved fingers wiped lenses clear. From time to time there came outbreaks of desultory clicking, as the watchers filled the waiting time by snapping the white canvas tent in the middle of the road, the entrance to the tall red-brick apartment block behind it, and the balcony on the top from which the body had fallen.

Behind the tightly packed paparazzi stood white vans with enormous satellite dishes on the roofs, and journalists talking, some in foreign languages, while soundmen in headphones hovered. Between recordings, the reporters stamped their feet and warmed their hands on hot beakers of coffee from the teeming café a few streets away. To fill the time, the wooly-hatted cameramen filmed the backs of the photographers, the balcony, the tent concealing the body, then repositioned themselves for wide shots that encompassed the chaos that had exploded inside the sedate and snowy Mayfair street, with its lines of glossy black doors framed by white stone porticos and flanked by topiary shrubs. The entrance to number 18 was bounded with tape. Police officials, some of them white-clothed forensic experts, could be glimpsed in the hallway beyond.

I think my blog readers would have voted much the same way. For me, there are virtually no story questions raised, and nary a hint of a character. I was fine with the first paragraph, and a body falling from a balcony is a good hook. But then, instead of a story about that, we detour into fulsome description of a media scene. But this is supposed to be a mystery, right? The prologue is backstory, and the first chapter starts three months later. No wonder so many agents skip prologues in the submissions they receive.

Here’s the blurb from the Amazon page. Do you think the first page has much to do with the story described here?

After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.

What are your thoughts?

If you’d like to help beginning novelists with your constructive criticism, join me on Wednesdays and Fridays for floggings at my site, Flogging the Quill.

Ray Rhamey is the author of four novels and one writing craft book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. He's also an editor of book-length fiction and designs book covers and interiors for Indie authors and small presses. His website, crrreative.com, offers an a la carte menu of creative services for writers and publishers. Learn more about Ray's books at rayrhamey.com.

Comments

This is a mystery. Furthermore, it’s the *prologue* to a mystery, so I know we’re not going to be jumping right into the one-legged PI’s life, and I’m OK with that. Yes, this is a little long on description, but I don’t mind a story that unwinds slowly.

I would not have kept reading, the two paragraphs repeat rather than forward the scene and story. I’d have combined it into one paragraph, lumping the description of paparazzi and video crews together rather than establishing an unnecessary distinction between the two groups.
Oddly enough, the Amazon blurb is far more compelling.

It’s a slow start, but well written, so I’d forge on ahead. It’s clear the author puts some care into his words (okay, her words, now that we know who’s behind the pen name), which immediately raises the book above the flood of mysteries that are all plot and no art.

And as it’s a prologue, I understand that I’m probably not going to be dropped right into the main story right away, so its disconnection from the back-jacket blurb doesn’t bother me.

But I’m also a guy with no anti-prologue prejudice. I figure an author puts in a prologue for a good reason, so it would never occur to me to skip it.

I read the book and think Rowling did a bang-up job. She’s obviously an accomplished writer and spins out an involved and surprising plot with a host of fascinating characters, including her out of control private detective. What I found astonishing was that a bunch of agents turned it down because it did not have, as one said, “a compelling point of difference”. And that’s despite a passel of reviews lauding the author for coming up with a unique and memorable main character. To me, it’s the almost insurmountable barriers that a first novel faces. Editors shoot first and don’t bother to ask questions later. Fitting that the book is setting all kinds of sales records.

I voted even though I’ve already read the whole book – so clearly it was a “yes” for me. BUT, I’m sure that since I knew J.K. Rowling wrote it had something to do with my sticking with the story.

I enjoyed The Cuckoo’s Calling, but I wish she’d have had a stronger editor to control the superfluous prose. I found myself frequently annoyed and skipping whole paragraphs as Rowling digressed, yet again, into long pointless explanations and over-written paragraphs.

I liked the story and the mystery was very satisfying, so I would still recommend the book to mystery lovers. However, I really really hope that Rowling’s editors can have a talk with her about what a good editor does and why she needs one.

This. THIS is what I’ve been saying. Rowling does many things well; but it seems that once someone’s selling an oodleplex of books their publishers merely print as-is instead of EDITING. And Rowling needs a danged good editor–there are too many passive-voiced instances, and, I hate to say it, nonsensical plot holes. I love escaping in to the world of Harry Potter, don’t get me wrong–but I have to force myself to ignore certain things, lest I get pulled out of the story.

Her strengths are clearly world-building and character; an editor could help her get rid of the sticky wickets.

BTW Stephen King has been suffering this same syndrome, I find. Because he’s Stephen King, he doesn’t get edited because people will buy his books in droves regardless.

I would keep reading a little further, but the whole time I’d be wondering why we need a second paragraph about the media. The writing is good, even if I hate when people talk about disembodied fingers or other body parts doing things. I really hate that.

I will admit, I bought the book because of the author. I wanted to see how she would do with a straightup/no magic mystery. I began reading but I have yet to finish. I find myself putting the book down and not really wanting to keep reading. I doesn’t hold me. Maybe it’s that the prologue is so separate from the rest of the story. Until I read the blurb in this article (taken from the Amazon page), I didn’t realize the story is more about the PI not the girl. Maybe I keep expecting the story to be about the jumper because of the prologue. All in All, I am disappointed with it so far. I will try to continue reading, I hope it improves…if not…I won’t be buying any more. I find the “voice” boring.

Mysteries are a bit like wine. There are many that are mediocre and only a few that rank 90 or above. I like mysteries and have read many authors that specialize in them, but I’m not sure I would have picked up this book let alone read the prologue. Part of it is the names. I can’t get involved with characters that are named Cormoran and Lula. I’m also a photographer, and we would never put a gloved hand on a camera lens. Finally, although I love details, I was overwhelmed with so many details right at the beginning. I need the facts, Ma’am. Just the facts.

I started reading this on Tuesday night and the whole time I kept wondering what you would say about the prologue. You’ve had a big effect on me, Ray! Anyway, I thought it dragged at the start and I couldn’t help but compare it to the beginning of her first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I’m pretty sure that would have passed muster with Flogging the Quill — the difference between a young,hungry writer and a vet!

I was annoyed by the second paragraph belaboring the media activity, rather than getting to the story, so I probably would have skipped it, but kept reading. It’s interesting to me that most agents and editors seem to hate prologues, while most readers have no problem with them. That there even is a prologue, to me, raises the dramatic question: How will this figure into the story to come? The prologue is itself a mystery to be solved.

At the first read it didn’t catch my interest at all. I like novels that get to the action. I re-read to see what it was that I didn’t like about it. There was too much unnecessary description. Example: on hot beakers of coffee from the teeming café a few streets away. Why is that important to know that it was a few streets away?

I also found some of her sentences way too long, like she was rambling on: To fill the time, the wooly-hatted cameramen filmed the backs of the photographers, the balcony, the tent concealing the body, then repositioned themselves for wide shots that encompassed the chaos that had exploded inside the sedate and snowy Mayfair street, with its lines of glossy black doors framed by white stone porticos and flanked by topiary shrubs.
I think it would have read better had she written this in shorter sentences.

I’d pass on it, prologue or not, because of the many missed opportunities. The first sentence is a weak simile. Ronda is correct about fingers on lenses, so not authentic. “. . . desultory clicking” . . . showing off vocabulary too soon and in a passive construction. She chooses to simply label those who should be caught in the drama as “the watchers. . . ” and could have brought us closer by using a potent noun and showing anything about those people.

Some have already pointed out the second paragraph does not broaden the effect of the first.

I’m glad to hear many think the story is good but am disheartened by this start coming from a prime figure in the art. When good writers actually write “good,” it helps us all.

I would have kept reading. My attention was caught at the end of the first paragraph with the hook that a body had fallen, and I was interested by the description of the intense media interest and paparazzi. That in itself was setting up another question for me: obviously someone super important/famous had died. Who was it and why?

I like to read a variety of styles in novels, from terse and snappy to measured and richly descriptive, especially in mysteries. I don’t need a book to be action packed from the first sentence, and would give this one a chance.

(I don’t mind prologues. But I do not enjoy descriptions of scenery that lack a character’s point of view.)

Story questions: Yeah, I wonder what happened to the dead person.
Character: I didn’t notice anyone in particular, except the body, which is dead.
Voice and Clarity: Okay. Objective voice, clear. Easy to read.
Tension: Maybe. My state is more like curiosity than tension.

I didn’t even make it to the end of the first page, to the part where I’d have found out there was a body in the tent. I’m not an editor or an agent, but do not like prologues, and there are very few authors for which I’ll make an exception. I’d thought JKR would be one of them, but, no. It felt like a lot of throat clearing. Worse, a lot of excessive use of interesting vocabulary writerly throat clearing. Given that A Casual Vacancy didn’t work for me, either, I think I may just be a fan of her Harry Potter writing.

The book didn’t catch my eye in the first place, and I had already read those first two paragraphs and put it down (my favored method of book selection is reading the first page or so). Of course, I’m probably one of the few people in the world to whom J.K. Rowling does not matter; I found the Harry Potter books, when I tried, had too many words ending in -ly and I just couldn’t deal at the time.

I vote with you. It did not hold me. Neither did Harry Potter’s first pages. I tried reading JK’s HP because everyone was talking about how great it was but it didn’t hook me fast enough. Not at all in fact. By the time I picked up the book, the movies were starting to come out so I decided to stick with them. The movies were great. I might go back & try to read the books again.

Rowling didn’t just “hand it off to her publisher.” She went through an elaborate subterfuge to get it published by a different house and submitted to several. As far as I understand, her editor didn’t know she was the author until he’d finished it. And that he was only given it to read after she hadn’t received an offer by different editor. But it had received two offers to serialize it on television. She was furious to have been outed so soon after publication because she said not even her closest friends knew she had written a book under a pseudonym.

I enjoyed the story. I thought it was good for a first crime mystery. Not great. I knew who the killer was from the beginning. What she did do well, which is also what Christie does well, was to make me doubt my conclusions, right at the moment the detective was sure of the killer. But I have faith she’ll improve. She’s an extraordinarily hard worker and mystery is her forte: one could say most of the Harry Potter series is a series of mystery books; with the exception of book six I believe (which she says is a how done it).

I also knew that this book was likely the set up for Comoran Strike and would therefore require her to give the reader more of his history than future books might need.

As for the set up in the excerpt shown in this post, I liked it for several reasons. First it makes sense as you read the book, and you realize how clever the killer was in timing the murder. Second, I happen to like character as setting. Third, this is London, not New York. Londoners tend to be far more low key than this opening indicates; so that anyone who understands the English (or the British) will know that this kind of “buzz” means something “big” has happened.